Video Game / Settlemoon

After the moon vanished, the fantasy game world of Settlemoon lays abandoned in darkness. Re-light the skies, provide rest and resources for travelling adventurers, and piece together what happened to the world.

Settlemoon is a town-building idle game released in July 2023 by Lepioid. Players build and manage a town for adventurers, buying their collected materials to build more structures, stock shops, and take on progressively more challenging bosses. The game is somewhat similar in philosophy to Majesty in that you must rely on adventurers that you cannot directly control, but is quite firmly its own thing with a 2d pixel art style, diegetic and dynamic music, and a mysterious story told mostly without words.

The long-abandoned fantasy MMORPG world of Settlemoon is brought back to life by an interloper who restores its moon and re-lights the skies. With the help of a veteran player from the game's heyday, they build and stock shops for a vibrant and diverse rotation of randomly generated adventurers, who in turn take on quests and fight bosses for rare materials. As the town expands and players flock back to the game, the world's long-dormant denizens begin to take notice.

The game places a heavy emphasis on letting the player discover its mechanics on their own, at their own pace, with only just enough tutorialization to point you in the right direction and absolutely no failure states. There is very little text in the game at all, relying instead on pictograms and unlockable story cards to guide the player and tell its story. It also encourages players to beautify their town to their liking, with a plethora of decor that boost nearby shops and buildings.

The game's Discord can be found here.

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This game provides examples of:

• 1-Up: Settlemoon is meant to be played with friends, so personal extra life items don't exist, but forbidden magic can be used to make Revival Potions at the Potion Shop.
• Abnormal Ammo: In the Ranged shop and, later, the dedicated Archer shop you can sell arrows made of monster teeth and bat wings as well as bombs made out of slime for the Gunner class.
• Anti Poop-Socking: Unlike other recent incremental games, the game is intended to be left alone for periods of time. Most players will stock their shops, set a moon, and only return after the timer's up to collect their income and re-stock.
• All Your Powers Combined: Repairing the Sun Gate with Luna requires one of each Keeper drop and one of each event Moon drop, thus requiring leaning into six of the game's elements at least once each. The result is a chrysalis that eventually yields a Monarch Butterfly, who provides a Sunrise that serves as a supercharged Moon, tripling the game's activity and letting villagers bring in loot from every event Moon.
• Animal Motifs:
  • The Moons are provided by moths, who are heavily drawn to light. Luna, in trying to finish Settlemoon's Sun Gate and ultimately bringing Settlemoon too close to the Sun, also matches this. And lastly, Sunny and the Sunrise he put into Settlemoon are represented by Monarch Butterflies, diurnal moths who fly far from their birthplace and often never return.
  • New Game Plus and its new Keeper are first symbolized by an overgrown beetle, representing that Settlemoon is now dead but can be the start of something new. However, in the New Moon update, this Keeper asks if you may give new life to Settlemoon itself through doing something personal with each of the other Keepers; doing so changes it into a bee, a creature who helps new life bloom without needing to die and decay.
• Author Avatar: In-universe; Luna, Settlemoon's developer, makes frequent appearances as their Luna moth avatar.
• Apathetic Citizens: Adventurers seem to care little for your goals and struggles and must be influenced by stocking the right items and constructing the right buildings. Justified in that they're just here to play an MMO.
• Art Shift: The game's ending, which you may only see once per save file, shows Rose getting off their computer and going outside. It features an even-starker art shift at the end, with a picture Rose took with the real-life friends they made in Settlemoon.
• Artificial Atmospheric Actions: In addition to purchasing items from your shops, adventurers will trade and chat with one another, ponder shops and decorations, idly swing their weapons, dance, and even diegetically play the game's soundtrack with a wide variety of instruments.
• Being God Is Hard: The story card for beating the fifth Keeper reveals why Luna brought Settlemoon down; she ultimately became Better with Non-Human Company after Sunny's departure, due to constant complaints and requests about her game, and couldn't handle all of the various stresses of being the sole person to keep the game up (at least at the same time). Whenever Catalyst starts a new Settlemoon town, they find Luna already inside the world, in quiet contemplation.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • Rose lets their version of Settlemoon shut down after a painful attempt to extend it; unlike with Sunny's sudden departure and Luna's abrupt half-abandonment, however, the players get to celebrate completing the game beforehand. Rose then goes on to start a new life, either meeting their best Settlemoon friends in real life or making new friends, and leaves something new for Catalyst in-game.
  • Luna doesn't attend your second and subsequent Sunrise celebrations, and these still cause Settlemoon to shut down. However, the credits reveal that Luna is asleep during all of this; still in the game, and in what looks like the easternmost part of the map that still exists, but enjoying the warmth in her own way. A full Moon is in the sky behind with her.
• Bizarro Elements: Aside from the Natural Elements, there's Growth, Rot, Melee, Ranged, and Moon. Rot is represented as a purple fire instead of a skull. On top of that, each element draws its own kind of Moth to Settlemoon, which gives a special event Moon for the player to show off:
  • Melee, Ranged, and Moon: A regular old Moon, showing the current lunar phase.
  • Rot: A green Moon that has hatched and released swarms of hungry insects.
  • Air: A meteor shower with some of the meteors hovering in the sky, playing host to sapient crystal-folk.
  • Fire: A supermassive nautilus that makes the world summer-y.
  • Earth: A partial Eclipse (looking like a solar one) that activates various portals through time.
  • Growth: A cross between a Blood Moon and a Harvest Moon, beckoning October vibes.
  • Water: A gigantic comet that might actually be a colossal whale, bringing the First Snow.
  • You can unlock a Moon that's actually Moon-elemental, after you exchange other Moons for them at a New Game Plus altar; it is large and aquamarine, it shows the sky behind it to be a bubbling cosmic ocean, and it prompts the growth of gigantic moon lilies who release star-like pollen. It's the shortest of the Moons, thereby attracting less traffic overall, but it's the strongest Moon in quick bursts.
• Break the Cutie: Rose goes from a helpful friend to the closest thing the game has to an antagonist.
• Came Back Strong: You can reincarnate the Forgotten Guardian in New Game Plus! Granted, you have to build an altar he falls apart on first, but still. One of the devs (though it's not clear which, or if it was even done by the devs) redraws and repairs his degraded elements, seemingly inspired by the dreams of Settlemoon's players, and returns him to this world in a corrupted-looking cocoon.
• Cast of Snowflakes: Adventurers have randomized appearances, randomized behaviors and leveling rates that emulate certain playstyles, and six different character classes they can be. You can also add 125 of these little fellas to your Friends list, to keep track of them and encourage them to come back a bit more often.
• Character Customization: The player can copy parts of an adventurer's appearance to apply to their own avatar.
• Conlang: Most of Settlemoon's text uses one of these, in the same spirit as the different languages in World of Warcraft. The only major spoiler you'll get from solving it, though, is a four-letter acronym next to the unfinished Sun Gate that reveals its purpose: "To Close Your Game", or To Complete Your Game. The New Moon Update changed the conlang cipher to make every letter solvable with just the in-game information, but it also changed some of the conlang text (including that spoiler) to be more "Settlish".
• Creator Cameo: A few developers and beta testers can be added as adventurers by using special friend codes available in the game's discord.
• Crisis of Faith: The Blind Keeper in New Game Plus begins to wonder if outside forces really care about Settlemoon, and designs a radio station for detecting the care of the stars. Interestingly, this is actually him doubting his belief that they don't.
• Digital Abomination: Two Keepers are downplayed examples, which are more unsettling or tragic than horrifying:
  • The Blind Keeper is a self-blindfolded spider-mage who addresses Catalyst directly instead of the entire town, in English instead of Settlemoon-ish, and asks you to stop playing. He's Settlemoon's steward of sorts, running Luna's palace in her absence and "authoring" the explanation of Settlemoon's nature. Formerly a Flunky Boss with a lower position, Luna repurposed his ability for spawning players and objects into the game after she destroyed Settlemoon's Sun Gate in response to losing Sunny. Supposedly, witnessing a recording of the incident made the Blind Keeper blind himself, learn English, and wish to nudge you out of the game; it's more likely that Luna edited him to be this way, however.
  • The Forgotten Guardian, "Keeper of all that never came to be", is an unfinished boss that barely even exists within Settlemoon. It fails to spawn in all-the-way whenever even pictures of it appear; aside from in its story card, anyway, which details why it came into such a sorry state. Its equipment is turning to Dust Flakes upon it, such Flakes create gear that's cool-looking but bad due to its assigned elements being wrong, and Rose is unable to even touch any of it with their code; Luna couldn't bring herself to work on the dragon-knight without Sunny, after all, and Sunny's work was a very long time ago. On the other hand, the Forgotten Guardian has immensely increased relevance during the invasion of the Rememberance Roses at the end of the game; the collected Roses can be used with the Dust Flakes to produce nice decorations, including a spring that gives the dusty gear new life as Moon-elemental masterpieces.
• "End of the World" Special: The world map of Settlemoon starts out in severe disrepair, with Rose's vines trying their darnedest to hold together the various landmasses and prevent them from falling apart further. Everything will be alright in the end, but only once Settlemoon shuts down properly and is reborn as Luna initially left it, in a "circle-of-life" or "new day" manner.
• Elemental Powers: Most bosses have one or more associated elements, such as Growth for Count Cerise, Rot for the Eye Stalker, and Air for Magnum Spark. Learning to manipulate the elements is an important part of progression, as well.
• Elemental Weapon: You can sell dozens of different kinds of these in your shops.
• Evil Tainted the Place: "Evil" is a bit of a stretch, but Rose's rage against the first Sunrise has white Rememberance Roses rampage through Settlemoon, trapping the original Keepers, choking out the spawning of regular monsters, and driving Blind Keeper's spider minions berserk. Adventurers can be ordered to cut the Roses, which can then be used for some nice decor; the Keeper-trapping patches have their own flowery Keepers guarding them, however.
• Exhausted Eye Bags: Rose and Luna both have these, though only Luna shows them on their avatar.
• Falling Damage: Earning one of the easier Achievements in the game reveals that Settlemoon used to have falling damage that a specific trinket would negate, making Settlemoon Proper one of the few 2D games to briefly consider that a good idea. The trinket remains as a collectible, and cats who look like it sometimes appear as familiars.
• Familiar: Adventurers can sometimes come in with Familiars, based on game progression; a Cat after all three archetype shops have been built, for example, or a Kobold after Magnum Spark has been defeated. There's also a Sheep familiar that adventurers can buy from the Magic Shop after you stock it with Leather. You can then add these to your avatar by copying outfits.
• Flash Step: Something Rogues (the hook-carrying adventurers) can do.
• Flower Motifs:
  • Rose binds Settlemoon back together with their vines, but their thorns are very inflexible and ultimately choke out whatever doesn't abide by their wishes. Them going outside and doing something new with their life is represented with Sunflowers, which grow in whichever direction the light is facing instead of expecting the light to come to them, and the Sunrise Sprouts are sprouted sunflower seeds.
  • Settlemoon also does this with pollen and its fragrance. Rose blankets and bubbles Settlemoon in a purple pollen as they work on reviving the game, and starts to do the same to Luna when trying to hug her. This tints Settlemoon's sky and changes the game world's atmosphere, and Luna rejects it. New Game Plus has a different example of this, where moon lilies and minor enemies called "Memory Distortions" spread "Star Pollen", and where one of the Keepers gets a new form that looks like the lilies. In both cases, pollen appears to represent dreams and wishes.
• Fetch Quest: The quests you send adventurers on are implied to be this.
• Fishing Minigame: A minigame you cannot partake in, but a minigame you can cater to with the Fishing Shop.
• Forbidden Zone: Two areas of the game, stemming from the game having only three-or-four Keepers fully accessible ^note Assuming the purple slime in Rose's notes was a placeholder when it last went down:
  • The second-highest-level area of the map has a heavy tropical theme, but it's severed from the rest of the map (with some of the ocean raining into the void), and the actual dungeon is encased in glass. It's oddly close to the Rune, which the game's code is oddly unstable around. Near-or-inside the dungeon is Diamondback, a Keeper who overzealously prevents things from degrading by preserving them in glass.
  • The highest-level area of the map was far less fortunate, as Sunny hadn't started testing it before he had to go. Meant to be a desert mesa closest to the Sunrise, it "never came to be" and disintegrated, as though the Rune above it made time pass extremely quickly. Its Keeper has only managed to maintain its boss arena and some swirling floating rocks, but that it's so ridiculously strong (against non-Growth builds) despite lacking attack patterns indicates that its burden is truly immense...
• Funny Animal: Some of the world's denizens fit the bill.
• Furry Confusion: The game has both regular Moths and moth-people. The moth-person is even the same kind of Moth as the most-common Moth in the game.
• Game Within a Game: Settlemoon is framed as an real-world 90's MMO that the player is helping to revive. You don't actually play it, however. The ending portrays it as a Metroidvania of sorts, which had at least some merchandise, while one of the Achievement trophies places the start of the game at 1997.
• Genre Shift: As of Part Two of the New Moon Update, New Game Plus offers puzzles and mini-challenges that are fairly different from what the main game is focused on. Each one is tied to one of the Keepers, and each one is interestingly available even during the Keeper-replacing endgame. One of these persists across multiple towns, while the other six need to be done all in the same town for permanent effects.
  • Count Cerise plagues visiting adventurers with poofy wigs of leaves that disable their classes, requiring a potion (or shampoo) of three specific ingredients to cure. Finding the correct recipe is treated like a game of Mastermind. You do not need to sell the potions/shampoos (though the correct combination and some indirect combinations do turn a profit), but you do need to take them out of the distillery and put them up for sale.
  • The Eye Stalker sets up a dojo where he bonks adventurers as some sort of Superboss parody. This is a Red Herring; since adventurers cap out at Level 99 and the Super-Stalker is always two levels above your Town's level, the challenge is to improve the right adventurers without raising the Town level too much. He also fights only one class at a time, starting with Soldiers.
  • Magnum Spark doesn't actually have a challenge to offer, but its kobold creators want to expand their amusement park to the town. The attractions are expensive to set up, but don't need restocking and can always sell tickets, which you need five-thousand of. Since the rides sell a service and not a good, decorations don't boost the speed of the rides or adventurers' attraction to them.
  • Blind Keeper wants you to set up a radio station and tune it at specific constellations, one of each element. The constellations appear in the sky when you attune the town towards certain elements, but the radio requires a certain lack of "white noise" from other elements. One of the constellations is of the Moon element, but that one isn't actually needed, so it may be easier to attempt this before the Endgame.
  • Diamondback misses their mate, and wants you to send adventurers on excavations in the world map, hoping to find something about them. The serpent adds a shovel to the quest menu, which lets you send adventurers on treasure hunts. There are twelve things to find. Like with the Eye Stalker's quest, this quest may be easier before you trigger the Endgame, as the clue images are taken from the map with all seven Keepers available but no Sun Gate.
  • Forgotten Guardian wants you to make a Moon altar. When you make it, he crumbles away while trying to step through an invisible portal atop it, removing all instances of him from the game. How do you get him back? Well, you can make the other side of the portal visible by sacrificing three different Moons, but only for a bit; doing so gives a new cocoon type that, just for this instance, can only hatch under a moonless/Rune sky.
  • Sprouted Acolyte starts all of these, actually, but the overgrown bug shell may have a request of its own...
• God of Light & God of the Moon: Sunny and Luna, respectively.
• Good Versus Good: Rose's understanding of Settlemoon, as a player/moderator and not as a developer/administrator, gradually forms a schism between them and Luna. Both want people to enjoy Settlemoon, but Rose doesn't understand why Luna changed elements of Settlemoon (especially while it was down, without any feedback from the community), and they don't get why Luna and Catalyst would want to bring on the Sunrise if it would possibly mean the game's crashing. When they wrest control of their Settlemoon from Luna, they convert the Keepers into tougher bosses and add additional equipment to collect, pulling up the base of the ladder, because they think that adding an extra challenge for hardcore fans like themselves will keep the game alive for longer; Catalyst (with Luna's blessing) pushes past this, however, so that they and the adventurers can finally celebrate the completion of the game. Since Settlemoon can always be restarted, Luna is technically more in-the-right than Rose, but the two part ways amicably; Rose doesn't display any guilt for their actions in their goodbye letter, and Luna officially adds their ideas to the game as one last hurdle for earning future Sunrise celebrations. The Sunrise Sprouts in subsequent runs are implied to be Rose's idea, as a gift to Catalyst.
• Have You Seen My God?:
  • At some point, the Sun god disappeared, leaving Luna to run the game on their own and eventually resulting in Settlemoon's closure. The specifics of what happened to them are left unclear.
  • Rose tries finding Luna to seek answers regarding the things that changed in Settlemoon, though the answers don't please them.
• Health Potion: Several different kinds, in fact! There are also bandages!
• Heroic BSoD: Out of frustration with Settlemoon not being the way they remember it, Rose undergoes one of these and forcibly changes all of the bosses to better fit their memories.
  • In the game's backstory, Luna has one of these when trying to run Settlemoon alone, and ends up shutting down the game.
• History Repeats: New Game Plus.
• Interface Screw: There's a Moon that replaces all instances of black in the game with dark blue: only the adventurers and materials are spared.
• Joke Item: You can make Liquid Dust in this game, by taking a Dust Flake from the Forgotten Guardian and putting it into an Inn. Absolutely no one will drink it; adventurers will drink Slime, literal Lava Juice, and beverages that stare at them, but they'll leave the dusty drink alone for all eternity.
• Leitmotif: While Luna is in town, a steel drum is added to the background music, changing certain Moon themes quite a bit.
• Light Is Good: It's not made clear what light represents in Settlemoon, but it allows adventurers to find Catalyst's town, so it must be invariably good for the setting. During the absence of light in the sky, Rose's light lets Settlemoon be found by Catalyst. The world can handle only so much light, however, before it goes into maintenance and the interlopers' work is shone away.
• The Lost Lenore: Sunny for Luna. The sorrowful split is pervasive in-game, much like how the Moon only shines because of the Sun, and the biggest example is that the game's Sun portion (along with the Forgotten Guardian) was left incomplete. New Game Plus now touches on this; one of the sidequests required for the Golden Ending reveals that the white dragon Settlemoon used to have is Diamondback's mate, and that the two were made for each other by Luna and Sunny, with hints that Sunny made Diamondback and it was preserved for that reason.
• Mana Potion: Made from Shells or Icicles at the Potion Shop. They're non-elemental. Shells also make non-elemental Magic Orbs at the Magic Shop.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: A few story events that happen in-game border on supernatural, making it seem as though the game or elements of it are self-aware. Since Settlemoon is a Game Within a Game, a great deal of embellishment occurs in the story and lore, and most or all of these could be described as Luna messing with the players or asking Catalyst to do things in a highly-indirect manner; however, the permanently game-altering storyline with the Forgotten Guardian is made out to be either a hack or some sort of divine intervention.
• May It Never Happen Again: Rose never returns after the end of your first Settlemoon town; not apologizing for her actions, but accepting that they wouldn't get what they wanted from Settlemoon ever again. Luna takes up her role, but leaves Rose's "improved" Keepers and Moon-elemental gear in the game.
• Meaningful Name: Not quite in the sense of the actual names, but in how they are revealed.
  • Rose's name is immediately provided at the end of their in-game guide, indicating their pride in their work put into Settlemoon and their desire to make connections.
  • The name of the moth, Luna, is only provided in the postcard she gives you for triggering the game-ending Sunrise for the first time; this indicates that they have the opposite feelings of Rose, and shows how much accomplishing that feat meant to her.
  • The name of the Player Character, Catalyst, is played straight in this trope, as a catalyst is merely something that causes a reaction of two other things to happen; in-game, Catalyst is essentially given tools by Rose so that Rose and the other adventurers may enjoy Settlemoon properly. Catalyst is the name brought up most-often in-game, even outside of the in-Settlemoon Conlang; it's first used as part of Blind Keeper's scripted fourth-wall-tapping (aimed at Catalyst), and it's then used by Rose when they finally thank them for their endeavors.
  • The name of Settlemoon's co-dev, the Sun Butterfly, is never actually revealed. The fans call him "Sunny", though.
• Money Sink: Players of the original Settlemoon had the option to melt their Silver down into crowns, one of which can be obtained by selling one million Silver worth of stuff.
  • A crow visitor implied to be another veteran player may offer stacks of a Boss's Item Drop, for eyebrow-raising prices. In New Game+, for instance, he can sell stacks of Sunrise Sprouts for ten thousand silver.
  • New Game Plus lets you create a Sun for your town, for a truly-insane number of Kobold Fireworks and Fire Slimes.
  • The New Moon update has added a colossal Obelisk of Silver, which is constructed out of one million coins.
• New Game Plus: After beating the game you have the option to "re-live Settlemoon". New Game Plus introduces a new boss with a new material, and new decor. Only the Achievement statues remain, but you receive a quantity of Sunrise Sprouts equal to the monetary worth of everything you had at the end of the game, Moons included. The only major difficulty-change (other than an added Superboss) is that the endgame portion will replace less of the regular Monster quests, slowing the portion down somewhat by limiting your Rememberance Rose intake.
• Non-Elemental:
  • A lot of the stuff for Wizards and Shepherds in-game is non-elemental, making it a safe bet for increasing the Town level without lowering your odds of finding a Moth you'd like. Their shops sell elemental stuff, too, but in smaller quantities than most other shops.
  • The dusty old stuff made from Dust Flakes is a special sort of non-elemental, that appears to make the Town less elementally aligned. All eight regular Elements are affected. Given the icons for it, though, it may have been multi-elemental gear that deprecated or was implemented incorrectly.
• Not in This for Your Revolution: Though she works on Settlemoon while Catalyst is around, Luna reveals to Rose that she simply cannot bring herself to finish the game without Sunny, and isn't nearly as bothered as they are about what Sunrise brings. Luna just wants to see Settlemoon through to the end, and Rose fails to get her to agree with them.
• NPC Boom Village: As the town grows, you'll attract progressively more adventurers and strange new characters.
• Our Kobolds Are Different: Settlemoon's dominant NPC race. They're green, they're tinkerers, and they love money. There's also a single red kobold, apparently made by Sunny for an event that never happened (according to a New Game Plus sidequest), and blue kobolds either once existed or were going to exist for the event.
• Out of Focus: The actual setting and story of Settlemoon (aside from the "meta-narrative" of its collapse and rebirth) is not revealed to you, though unused monster loot descriptions suggest various things. For instance, while Rose's "improved" Keepers are still in New Game Plus and appear properly-integrated into the world, we don't know how Luna changed the story to accommodate them.
• Palette Swap: You can paint buildings and decor with spare resources.
• The Player Is the Most Important Resource: In New Game Plus, Rose's rose-light that represents Settlemoon's accessibility is replaced with a Fourth-Wall-facing sunflower-mirror; you're the light of the world now.
• Pun: Defeating a powerful spider gives an informative overlay to the player: it's like Minecraft's Debug Mode.
• Quirky Town: All sorts of strange folk visit your town. Even the bosses stop by, and deliver a bit of exposition in the form of a story card.
• Refining Resources: A late-game building slowly produces powerful equipment out of an otherwise useless resource. New Game Plus adds a building that lets you convert three Moons of different types into three "Moon-type" Moons, too.
• Renovating the Player Headquarters: The town starts out as a rocky, shattered piece of land. It's up to you to turn it into something nicer.
• Reset Button: When the Sun touches the Sun Gate, Settlemoon shuts down and everyone's progress is reset, even Catalyst's progress with the town. This is dramatized in the story card for the Blind Keeper, where Sunny exits through the Sun Gate (for presumably the first and last time) and most of Settlemoon is rapidly deleted by the closing rune, but the Forgotten Guardian's story card indicates that the process is far-less-violent and far-more-gradual.
• Ret-Gone: An entire boss is absent from the game, one once very-important if going off of Rose's notes. Context is provided in New Game Plus after the "New Moon" Update: originally a faction/war event was planned between Luna and Sunny's creations, particularly the Ice Dragon "King" of Settlemoon and the Forgotten Guardian, but Sunny left before he could finish the Forgotten Guardian or his minions. Valuing Sunny's work more than her own, Luna kept and tried repurposing everything he made (though she couldn't bring herself to finish the unfinished stuff), while removing everything she made that reminded her of the event.
• Retraux: The game is presented in a pixel artstyle. Justified since the game takes place in a 90's MMO.
• Scenery Dissonance: The adventurers and the NPCs respond to the sky being lit, but the nonliving things do not. This is most obvious in the New Game Plus credits, where the background behind Luna's retreat is still pitch-black while morning starts; buildings and floors are always lit, for the sake of gameplayers' visibility, but the vast majority of the world is pitch-black at all times. This comes up in one of the New Moon Update's new quests, however.
• Self-Duplication: You can duplicate Catalyst by, when using the "Add Friend" feature, selecting Catalyst instead of one of the adventurers; this creates a so-called "Echo" of Catalyst, who will be Class-less (since you never did character-creation) and much more random than other adventurers. You can also duplicate adventurers already on your Friends List in this way, but the copies will be less likely to show up than the "Echoes".
• Shout-Out: In the bakery, you can sell bomb pies.
  • Adventurers sometimes have pets from Familiars.io.
  • Any adventurers left playing instruments in town after the stars fade will perform a rendition of Nearer My God To Thee as they disappear one by one.
  • Clicking the cookies is of no in-game use, but it does get you an achievement.
• Solar and Lunar: The creator gods/developers of Settlemoon have sun and moon motifs. They're also a Night and Day Duo.
• Summon Magic: Shepherds can purchase a summoning tome. What does it summon? Sheep.
• Superboss: The Sprouted Acolyte in New Game Plus, which drops Sunrise Sprouts. On top of being available right from the beginning and having an enormous HP bar for that point, its weaknesses and resistances regularly change.
• Take Up My Sword:
  • Boss Quests are typically done with multiple attempts, with each adventurer chipping off only some of its HP before being defeated and briefly kicked from the game. A Boss's HP only resets when they're defeated.
  • Deconstructed with running Settlemoon itself. Rose takes up the task of reviving Settlemoon themselves, but it's portrayed as unwilling on Settlemoon's part in Rose's explanatory story card, and Rose has only a limited and somewhat-outdated understanding of the task at hand. Their vision ultimately conflicts with that of the person they picked up the metaphorical dropped sword from, especially once they realize that the sword was dropped intentionally, and they end up damaging Settlemoon further when they redouble their efforts.
• The Night That Never Ends: Settlemoon exists in a permanent state of night, or at least the "game" part of the game-world is in that state. Everyone in-game still needs to sleep, though, and chooses to do so while a Rune is in the sky.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Is the regular Poison from Potion Shops not appealing enough? Well, at the late-game Rogue Shop, you can purchase Super Poison made from Eyeshrooms!
• The Stars Are Going Out: The stars in the sky will fade over time after the player refreshes the moon. When the timer runs out and the stars fade, adventurers will stop appearing in the town until a new moon is posted.
  • Faced with the daunting task of running Settlemoon alone after Sunny's disappearance, Luna eventually shut down the original Settlemoon by extinguishing the sky and replacing it with the rune.
  • The stars are heavily implied to represent Settlemoon's adventurers themselves, given how they match the adventurers' colors, along with an in-game statue for attracting enough visitors. On top of that, the Rune-sky theme is called Star Prayer.
• Town with a Dark Secret: Unlocking the town expansion reveals an unused area populated by sketches of unfinished buildings and decorations, including an unfinished cocoon tree that starts working after a few minutes. The kobold that opens the expansion is visibly confused by what they find.
• 20 Bear Asses: You can post quests for adventurers that will net you a number of monster materials. You can also post quests for a specific amount of up to four kinds of material, but they will take longer and cost more than a standard monster quest.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: You can grab and toss adventurers around with your cursor! Higher-level adventurers will gain tools for coping with your antics, however, such as magical classes learning how to fall slowly.
• Video Game Raids: Settlemoon's Keepers are essentially impossible to beat alone. While there is an Achievement for OHKO-ing each Keeper at least once, dealing that much damage hinges more on getting a ludicrous damage multiplier from flooding the world with stuff of certain elements than on adventurer levels or adventurer equipment. There are also Guilds, and having one of them bring a Keeper from full HP to zero in a single session also counts towards the Achievement.
• Weird Moon: One of the most prominent features of the game. Players can unlock event moons that cause event-only monsters and materials to spawn.
• Wham Line: The Blind Keeper is the first boss that speaks directly to you in English, and delivers some heavy exposition.
• What Could Have Been: In-Universe, there are many examples representing the various changes Settlemoon went through in its stunted life-cycle.
  • Just going off of Rose's catalogued memories, the Keeper order was significantly different, Luna replaced a dragon boss with Magnum Spark and a purple slime boss with Diamondback while the game was down, and Blind Keeper once dropped spools of string instead of Broken Tomes. One of the replaced bosses even had a much-more-complete page than Magnum Spark in the game's wiki.
  • Sunny's private contribution to Settlemoon included an entire island and a Keeper, but he disappeared before he could get Luna to properly integrate them with the rest of the game, causing their deprecation. He also made the Sun Gate, which players entered and exited from until Luna nuked it after his final departure; a blue sky and other floating islands can be seen through it, but they're unlikely to be real.
  • A story card for one of the New Game Plus Sidequests reveals a war event between two factions now absent in the game: a kingdom of blue kobolds on Luna's side, led by an ice dragon, and an invading force of red kobolds on Sunny's side, led by the Forgotten Guardian. It appears that the winner would've been decided by whether the green kobolds were given more Silver (Luna's side) or more Jewelry (Sunny's side). This event never happened, as the Forgotten Guardian was never completed and the story card indicates players having a choice of eight classes, but the green and red kobolds still remain.
• What If God Was One of Us?: The gods of Settlemoon are simply its developers. Or what's left of them, anyway.

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